domain:open.substack.com
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
21hr ago
The 5.8% figure is from two months ago and was already part of an upward trajectory. The writeup you linked largely confirms that Gazans are starving, though it argues that it's not due to Israel withholding aid.
Moving further into a true pariah status does not engender sympathy. The further a nation is moved into Certified Rogue State™ category the easier it becomes for people to justify and excuse hostility against it. Bad Guys get what they deserve. A high degree of tragedy in relation to their offense is required to turn Bad Guy into sympathetic character. For Israel, without the Certified Rogue State™ status, a reversal among Palestinian Aficionados might require something like tens of thousands of casualties from a chemical gas attack in Tel Aviv during a peace summit.
It's been 30 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa, yet considering South African whites oppressed in any fashion is not very popular. If South African whites were slaughtered at scale they'd garner some more sympathy. The value of this hypothetical changing sentiment a personal judgment.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
21hr ago
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I am responding to the OP’s future scenario
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You linked me to a long write-up by an activist. Why should I take it seriously? Do you have a specific reason to think Gaza isn’t facing starvation? Why not specify the compelling evidence instead of saying “here, read this long tweet by LiterallyWho”
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Why should I not trust the UN? https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165457
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Why should I not trust the World Food Programme? https://x.com/WFP/status/1947036919289741771
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Why should I not trust the World Hunger Organization? https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/gaza-facing-man-made-mass-starvation-says-whos-tedros-2025-07-23/
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Why should I not trust the NYT? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/middleeast/gaza-starvation.html
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Why should I not trust Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, and Oxfam? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9xkx7vnmxo.amp
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Are American Baptists lying to me? https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/more-than-100-organizations-are-sounding-the-alarm-to-allow-lifesaving-aid-into-gaza/
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^ Is the Catholic charity group Caritas from Germany lying to me?
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^ Is the Episcopal Peace Fellowship lying to me?
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Is Japan International Volunteer Center lying to me?
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^ Is the Mennonite Central Committee lying to me?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
21hr ago
I admit I don't fully understand the analogy OP is trying to make about insects, but you aren't alone in thinking that intelligence is judgable based on economic value - in fact, that's exactly how AGI is defined in the OpenAI-Microsoft contract, that AI generates 100 billion dollars in revenue! Yes, vague, and yes, causing problems, but that was what they wrote at the time. Still, a little lacking in rigor, no? Desktop computers generate billions of dollars in revenue, are they intelligent? What I think OP is saying is that instead of that, let's propose a different standard: intelligence is a degree of reactivity, and mechanically, current LLMs do not have this trait, they just 'make up' for it in practical usage by the sheer breadth and depth of their (text) knowledge base - but at their core they are simply good enough at the practical aspect that the lack of actual, true reactivity is partially obscured.
If anything to me the debates sort of remind me of the ones over personality, psychology, and determinism. We still haven't figured out strongly if people are deterministic or not, and so we seem ill-suited to judge how deterministic an LLM is in its responses. Personally, I'm satisfied by calling LLMs jagged or fragile intelligence, and I think that captures more nuance than a more loaded general term.
Or are you trying to make an argument that is a cousin to the descriptivist view of language (how people use a word today determines its meaning more than any internal, nominal, historical, or etymological meaning): if people treat an LLM as intelligent, then that very fact justifies them as intelligent? That strikes me as, well, I guess fair enough to say, but not particularly useful.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
21hr ago
through sheer force of will, it makes the absurdity and stupidity work.
One might say it rejects common sense to make the impossible possible.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
21hr ago
I disagree, I think both are very well written.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
21hr ago
That's fair. The episode stories are generally quite good.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
21hr ago
With all due respect, man, it sounds to me like you want a philosophy course, not a story. Going into the kinds of details you are demanding would be boring. I neither need nor want a meticulously thought out explanation of how the Puppet Master thinks (nor anything else you mentioned), that would just make the story a slog that very few people would want to watch/read.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
21hr ago
Oh, absolutely not, that's partly why I'm firmly a one-state solution advocate. Not that I have any power other than moral judgement, of course.
DirtyWaterHotDog
21hr ago
Are Gazans starving ? Not yet at least. Not in the way we understand starving. At 5.8%, that would put it alongside stable middle-economy nations like Mexico, Thailand and Brazil. Most of Africa & the Indian Subcontinent are doing twice as worse. Gaza's tragedies, like Ukraine over-reported in comparison to mundane everyday evil that kills more people everywhere else.
how much Israel can torture the civilians before there is sufficient moral pressure to make them stop
What's left? To viewers on social media, Israel is already conducting a holocaust-esque genocide. Facts be damned. I imagine Israel can keep going for much longer, because Hamas has milked social media sympathy for all its worth. The only pressure that matters comes from the State department or Israel's population. A change of heart of either group will come from a frustration with the ineffectiveness of how the war is run, rather than any moral calculus.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
21hr ago
Maybe this Virginia state lawmaker candidate who livestreamed sex with her husband in the past?
Tiber727
22hr ago
GamerGate: Leaderless movement where some Republican strategist came along after it started and made some remarks suggesting he wanted to capitalize on it for political gain, which the left ran with to claim him as a mastermind of a Twitter mob. Side note: I like to compare this to claiming Putin controlled BLM because he supposedly had some trolls online try to fan it to increase fragmentation in America.
Tea Party: Fair that I don't remember how much central planning, but to my recollection there was no leader, more comparable to current Trump protests where they say they're protesting on X date, please come.
BLM: My point in this was that said group that co-opted it was irrelevant to it being a movement.
The will of the electorate is what I'm talking about. If you can define a "will" and a group that possesses that will, you have a group that you can discuss. Leaders are irrelevant for this purpose. BLM is a group with demands, and I can support or rebut its ideas because they are definable enough to discuss. If BLM came along and said, "We're not a group because we came here independently and we're not trying to do anything (this claim is only made when trying to dodge criticism)" then people are free to call bullshit. If they don't want to be named that doesn't stop anyone from coming up with a name for them. If that name sticks then the lesson here is to get better at PR rather than whining that you should be uniquely immune to needing PR. Control the message or you will be controlled by it.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke?
No, the implication is that it's disproportionate. The consultants and the marketers believed that their view was correct (primarily morally and secondarily financially, and the former biases to believe the latter) and BLM in particular gave them the opportunity to sell it to their bosses as profitable. Again, conspiracy and coordination are not required, merely enough people doing a similar thing at a similar time.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22hr ago
The etruscans predominately were not enslaved and conquered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Etruscan_Wars
Rome was the eventual victor in the wars and the last Etruscan resistance was crushed in 264 BC when Volsinii was destroyed after a slave revolt. The Etruscans were assimilated into Roman culture and Rome became one of the Mediterranean superpowers amongst the Greeks and the Carthaginians, though the Etruscan language survived for another 300 years (until the early first century AD).
Maybe you have some rosy ideas about what iron age "assimilation" looked like. But coming from the civilization that made "Vae Victus" a household phrase, I doubt it resembled an American "Melting Pot" too closely. I think it's safe to say they were conquered and had their cultural identity destroyed.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
22hr ago
There is nothing I've seen that would indicate that people somehow became not ok with it once the ratio went slightly over 10 to 1. Rather it seemed to be that Israel became mainstream news, that's all. People whose special interest was the Israel-Palestine conflict have been harping about "genocidal settlers" well before the war.
Mantergeistmann
22hr ago
that's because what, 1200 Israelis died, and they've killed more than 12,000. We're up to what, almost 60k?
You really can't compare raw numbers, given a) Israel tried to keep its own people alive, b) Hamas tries to put its own people in harms way, c) the war is being fought in Gaza and not in Israel proper, and d) Israel is the stronger faction. Nobody would say, "Well, only X US soldiers and civilians were killed in Pearl Harbor, and now that the US is winning in the Philippines, the casualty ratio is shifting significantly, that means the US is doing warfare wrong and needs to sue for peace".
Thoroughlygruntled
22hr ago
A little bit of all three. The cost of legal services are unnaturally inflated by law schools and bar associations seeking to maintain the exclusivity of the profession and locking many simple services that could be performed by the client with maybe the help of a paralegal or online platform.
At the same time, law can also be very complicated, and something like going to trial is always going to be expensive simply due to the complexity and man hours required. The combination of high level research, writing, and public speaking skills required for quality litigation is rare and commands a high premium.
Certain aspects of law practice can also be very time-intensive and very expensive for thr attorneys involved. Going to court involves a lot of sitting around and waiting where you cant realistically do any other work. That's hourly time the client has to pay for. Expert witnesses, court reporters, private investigators, and the like also command steep rates, so while the big check might be made out to the law firm, a lot of that money is going right back out the door to these third party contractors. Often, you're not just hiring a lawyer. You're hiring a lawyer, his support team, multiple subject matter experts, an e-discovery vendor, graphic designers to create exhibits, etc.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
Does Israel actually want to be the ones distributing aid? It was my impression that they kind of like the current situation, where Gaza mostly starves but it's not their fault directly (they can blame the UN and other NGOs for doing a bad job of distribution inside Gaza, which is admittedly an awful job with terrible logistics and security implications).
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
That offer is not in the pipeline for the Palestinians.
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
The etruscans predominately were not enslaved and conquered, they joined Rome as Allies like other italic peoples. And while the Gauls were conquered, the majority of the population remained intact and Gallic-speaking until after the edict of Caracalla granted them citizenship.
Browser
22hr ago
I don't deny their second-class within Israel but is an independent Palestine likely to develop living conditions that are on aggregate better?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
Do you really believe that if Israël fell the entire citizen population wouldn’t be welcomed into the west with open arms?
If Israel fell, it would because the West (including the US in particular) had decided it was the bad guy, and no, the entire citizen population would not be welcomed under those circumstances.
Browser
22hr ago
If Hamas laid down their arms and initiated an actual unconditional surrender Gaza would likely be a below-median but perfectly functional part of Israel within a decade. Vice-versa hahahaha.
Browser
22hr ago
Probably would be some scruples about the orthodox population since they're not the most enthused net contributors
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
To be clear, you think that Gazans aren't starving, and the population is growing, during the war? What a strange take. (Statistically anyways in the pre-war period it's quite possible for a subset to starve while a different subset is above-replacement fertile, so I kind of wonder if you're just conflating headlines)
246 BC is emphatically not the iron age. Rome as a civilization famously did not require all conquered peoples to become culturally Roman so long as they colored within the lines.
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